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Online Customer Support versus Help Desk

In today’s world customer satisfaction has become an important factor in overall growth of the company. To interact with customer, companies are providing online customer support or Help Desk. While Help desk work is normally limited with troubleshooting problems, online customer support is more varied with providing the pre-sale assistance as well as the post-sale support to the customers. Apart from direct help, online customer support also includes online forums and communities which provide ways for customer query to be addressed.

One of the main advantages of help desk is that the all customer queries are tracked by ticketing mechanism i.e. each query of customer will be logged in a tracking mechanism and will be tracked till its closure irrespective of which support personal answered ticket first. By this way, based on the nature of issue, the query is assigned to appropriate support personal .There is always a set timeframe and escalation hierarchy defined with each ticket so the customer query/issue will get resolved in best possible way in least possible time. In case of online customer support direct queries are either through mails or live chats .But there is no fixed tracking mechanism hence there can be flexibility in the amount of time taken or quality of help provided to the customer.

In case the online customer support is provided in the form of live chats then customer can immediately chat with the support personal and get a speedy answer to a query. It also adds the personal touch of talking with a person in real time. This is particularly helpful if the support is provided at a time when the customer is about to buy a product and has some small doubts about it. Interacting with a support person at this time will help increase the sales of the product.

In case of helpdesk the customer questions and their answers are online in one tool they can be sorted in many different ways. Hence they simply easier to find by operators which increase the efficiency and solution consistency .Moreover they can be put into the knowledgebase of company which can be open for all customers which will increase the site traffic. In case of online support there is no common tool where the answers are placed. Though self-help sections are provided but they cannot be automatically transferred from the emails/chat answers to self-help information centre so the database cannot be stronger comparatively.